Images above and below are shots created by Darkside Animation (on behalf of Diesel Films) for the Discovery Channel special Houseboat.

Darkside_Houseboat 03.jpg (72.7 KiB) Viewed 239 times

Darkside_Houseboat 02.jpg (86.08 KiB) Viewed 239 times

Darkside_Houseboat 01.jpg (73.09 KiB) Viewed 239 times

It's funny--I dunno why exactly--but it's funny that Darkside Animation would not exist if it wasn't for NewTek's miraculous Lightwave software. Well, it certainly seems that way. Although, ultimately, I'd have to say that I think it would exist regardless, just maybe in a radically different form.

I'm betting Andy Bishop, Ben Beckett, Mike Rollison et. al. are damn glad they have the workflow and the pipeline that they do, since good work comes out of it on a regular as a result.

Their most striking work has to be their super-sexy ITV spots . . .

I mean, damn. Ah well, anyway, foreground plates work are especially luminous in these "stingers" (I believe the U.S. term is "bumpers" although I could stand to be corrected); in the "Too Loud" ITV segment, there is even what looks like a (animated, likely) parrot moving to the beat of the dance music on the handle of a boombox, as the screen scrolls left to right amidst young hipsters gettin' down and the like. Wonderfully random and surreal design work--not that I was expecting anything less from these guys.

Gonna spend a few sentences on one of their latest works, this Iron Maiden project . . .

And since I used up my photo attachment allowance for this post, I have deliberately chosen these two stills--the ones immediately above and below--to try and convey the VFX scope of Final Frontier, the name of the Iron Maiden music video. Suffice it to say (without going into tremendous detail), it's as insane as one could expect a video starring Iron Maiden members.